post 4

Is the youth generation today the dumbest ever?  First let us look at the statistics.  In 2001, 52 percent [of high school seniors] identified Germany, Japan or Italy, not the Soviet Union, as America’s World War II ally (Begey, Interlandi).  This is very sad to find out but what does it mean?  It is simple most seniors in high school that where spending their time in homeroom to take some national test that they did not have to worry about how they did.  Most of the people that I know that toke these assessment test like the PSSA, did not take them seriously.  They filled in their name and random bubbles so they could go to sleep.  I have seen surveys here where people just fled in bubbles on options that went use to promote an event here at SHIP.  Plus he never talks about how well any other age groups of Americans score on the same survey. 

Secondly this is all the same story that has been said for hundreds of years.  The old have been wringing their hands about the young’s cultural wasteland and ignorance of history at least since admirers of Sophocles and Aeschylus at the end of the Greek civilization ((Begey, Interlandi,). 

The Best argument that they can make is that we are lazier in ways then in the past.  Take a look at my Mondays I get up at 8:00 AM and I don’t get back to my room until 8 or 9 PM and then I have homework to do.  Majority of the students here that I know are managing school work and a job.  So how can we be lazy?  It is in the way we use the web.  That we week out what we already hope to find, and we want it fast and free with minimum effort (Drutman).  We like doing a Google search and if we can’t find what we want in the first few pages we start getting frustrated. 

They say because we rely on the internet that we don’t know anything, but we are taught that if you can easily look up the information then you don’t need to commit it to memory unless it is your major subject material.  We haven’t fight over religious believes or the color of someone skin, or created weapons of mass destruction that can destroy the world three times over.  So who is really dumb?  

Post 3

I’m going to vent a little here.   I don’t get Lasn.  He is looking through a filter that is so thick it is insane.  Frist about 70% of the US economy is made up of small family owned companies.  They employ majority of the American work force and contributes back to their local community supporting schools and youth sports programs.  Then he goes on and talking about how the internet is bad for us.  But yet when he couldn’t get the air time he wanted form the big new networks in Canada, he could have turned to the internet to inform the public about the whole deforestation that the one paper company was doing.  He just jumps to the conclusion that everything about who we are and what we use are bad for us.  He is writing one sided and not looking at any of the good aspects of the internet and technology.  In Second Skin, Dan came to the realization that the game was fake and just something stupid that he let fill his mind.  Yes computer games take you away from you current crappy life and it is understandable for one to think, if I could only do this I would be happy forever, because they are living in a fantasy.  It is no different than when you go to a sporting game or to the theater to watch a play.  You let yourself go; it just happens that the games and plays end because there are humans in them that need to eat and sleep just like us.  If you could have a play with 8 Million people in it from all over the world and it could never stop, would you want to leave that world?  If anything its more about how much time the people spend in these fake worlds that we should worry about.  That is what makes their fantasy world their real world.  I don’t want to sound ignorant but people do decide to kill themselves over a lot of different things.  It could be a dramatic loss of a love one, their significant other braking up with them, the voice in their head, or these games.  It happens and it has happen before the modern economic system was evented by the Romans and the introduction of technology.  After our last class most of us if not all of us where laughing because this gamer life that Second Skin and Culture Jam try to portray on us is a little out there to me.  Here at SHIP there is a gamers club, I don’t think they represent even one present of the campus community.  I’m just waiting for Lasn to say games like pokemon, uno, sudoku, etc. are hindering us from our max social potential between humans.  We are social.  Its human nature to be, that’s why facebook is so popular and they have chat windows in games.  We are connecting with people who have the same interest as we do, so why does it matter how we go about it?  There will always be this trade off effect in this world.  So the true question is, do the social networks and technology benefit or hurt the majority?  I say it benefits us.

Post 2-Ronald McDonald's Daughter

Is McDonald's changing the image of the company to attract more costumers?

When you hear the word McDonald's, you most like think of the golden arch and the white face, red hair clown that we all grow up with. But I have found this commercial it looks like it is being run somewhere in Asia. It has a model in her 20's, I would say, putting on some sort of show to get attention, mainly from males, to watch the commercial. I know when the commercials come on between shows I turn out and do something like talk to my friends or do some homework. So I don't know if this is the marketers new a tempt to get use to watch the commercials so we would want to buy a hamburger form McDonald's. But this goes with what Lash was saying about how there are subliminal messages with in the commercial manly focus on the girls say that they need to be think as a stick and have to have the "prefect" plastic looking face. I have showed this clip to several of my friends who are girls and they are just discussed with it. I know that both woman and man are getting more and more subliminal messages about how they look. But are these subliminal messages really that powerful? If we know what they are trying to do to us then why do we seam to still fall for their act? Is this media like nicotine to us, that we know its bad but we still fall for it?

 We are using social sites, like facebook, youtube, and even this blog to stay in contact with others. We use are phones to call and text each other and to see what is happening in our world. Is this bad? After all we are a social race, we depend on contacts with other humans to keep our self out of the "white jackets". So is technology really that bad? Or like many other thing have we taking its use further then we should have, and know something that was meant to help us keep in contact with each other hurting us as well?